Hotel Chains Try Training With Improv and iPods

Laurie Gerber, a president at the Handel Group, teaching a life-coaching course at the Benjamin hotel.Credit
Michael Appleton for The New York Times

Before two luxury hotels, the Andaz 5th Avenue in Manhattan and the Elysian Hotel in Chicago, opened their doors in recent months, both added something extra to their usual employee training practices: they hired improvisational comedy experts.

The Benjamin, an upscale business travel hotel also in New York, took a similar tack to help its staff better serve guests, offering them a series of life-coaching sessions this summer.

Other hotel brands — including Hilton Garden Inn, Aloft, Homewood Suites and SpringHill Suites — are using devices like iPods and the Sony PlayStation Portable to help with staff training.

The courses, which are offered in addition to more traditional classroom and online training, are part of an effort by hotels to distinguish their brand, said Bjorn Hanson, divisional dean of the Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management at New York University.

“There are 228 hotel brands in the United States, and the two ways to be distinctive are design and service,” he said. “Service can be a great differentiator.” Hotels, he added, “are in a period of experimentation. Some brands are employing skills unrelated to the lodging industry to transform service styles and delivery.”

The use of devices like iPods and the PlayStation Portable in training has a couple of advantages, hotel executives say. The devices appeal to younger employees, who, in many cases, already use them at home. The content is also relatively inexpensive to create.

Homewood Suites has spent as much as $250,000 to create a 20-minute training DVD, said Dawn Koenig, vice president for brand performance support at the chain. A 20-minute video iPod training module, meanwhile, costs $30,000 to $50,000, which means it is also cheaper to update and translate into languages other than English.

Tom Yorton, chief executive of Second City Communications, which provides improvisation and other training to corporate clients, said “the Web has shaped how people learn.” Teaching, he added, “has to be shorter, punchier, more entertaining and more interactive.” Second City Communications is a subsidiary of the Second City, the Chicago improvisational theater.

The Elysian, a luxury hotel that opened last December, hired Billy Bungeroth, a resident director at the Second City and a freelance improv teacher, to work with employees in sales, catering, security, concierge and other positions.

The goal was to foster “intuitive service,” said Jennifer Lee, the Elysian’s learning and development director. “Service by most luxury hotels is based on scripts. We want our people to have interactions with guests; improv gave them tools that enabled them to be successful with their intuition.”

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The needs of the Andaz 5th Avenue, which opened in July, were different from the Elysian’s: Andaz hotels (part of Hyatt) do not have registration desks or traditional employees like porters, front desk workers or concierges. Rather, they employ “hosts,” who greet guests as they arrive, check them in and cater to their needs.

“Guests come from all angles, and training needs to be unconventional,” said Jonathan Frolich, general manager of the Andaz 5th Avenue.

Thus, the hotel hired Chicago City Limits, an improvisational group in New York that also does corporate training, to develop a course to improve hosts’ communications skills, help them read guests’ body language and establish an immediate rapport with guests, said Linda Gelman, the group’s producer.

This summer, the Benjamin hired the Handel Group, an executive coaching company, to offer a series of life-coaching sessions to 10 staff members, including the general manager, sales and marketing executives and members of the wait staff. The goal of the sessions, said the hotel’s general manager, Andrew Labetti, was to help employees “set goals for their lives, set dreams of how they want their life to be.” He added, “If we help staff make real changes in their lives, create wellness for themselves, this will affect the guest experience.”

Marriott’s SpringHill Suites and Homewood Suites, an extended-stay Hilton brand, both were pioneers in using devices for staff training, starting in 2007. SpringHill Suites uses the Sony PSP and Homewood, video iPods. Aloft, a midprice Starwood brand, began using iPods to train its staff in early 2009, while Hilton Garden Inn began using the PSP for training last year.

Kathy Crabtree, director of design and development for SpringHill Suites and other Marriott brands, acknowledged that one risk of these devices is that they can depersonalize training. “The use of technology is important, but we will never go strictly to technology,” she said.

Hotels are looking to the new forms of training to “make their learning stick,” said Ron Doney, a former Marriott executive who now is president of Think Up Consulting in Greenville, S.C., which specializes in corporate training and advises SpringHill Suites and other hotel brands.

“The more engaging and fun training is for adults, the easier it is to recall memorable concepts when they need to on the job,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on September 7, 2010, on Page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Hotel Training With a Twist. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe